21.04-31.05.2011
Alicja Karska and Aleksandra Went’s videos and photographs offer images that trigger the memory of other images. In their latest video project, Delay (2010), almost the entire frame is filled with the image of an underground passageway with a dangling ceiling lamp. The slow pace of the narration, almost suspended in time, causes the viewer to focus on the image itself. The meditative rhythm of the frozen-frame video and, especially, the tension between movement and stillness refer us to a different temporality and memory animated by the memory of the image on screen.
Karska and Went have been working together since their studies at the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts. Authors of photographs, installations, films, public-space projects, they situate their practices on the fringes of the dominant visuality. Their works are often made almost ‘out of nothing’ and deal with usually ignored areas of reality. In their earlier works they addressed the psychological aspects of experiencing space and architecture. A frequent theme of their practice were deserted, ‘decommissioned’ spaces.
In a series of photographic portraits of hairdresser’s shop front windows in various cities around the world, they leaned over a niche element of urban visuality, vanishing gradually under the media and technological onslaught of advertising. A selection of 200 photographs from the series has now been published in an artist’s book titled Ladies and Gentlemen. The pictures can be arranged in sequences defying their geographical location, as the hairdresser’s front windows in Gdańsk, Tczew or Kielce are no different from those the authors had captured on the streets of Luxembourg City, Brussels, Amsterdam or Tel Aviv. This repertoire of slightly outdated fashions and narratives can be read in terms of not only consumer persuasion but also cultural recycling.
